Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small town - Freiberg -
in Moravia (now a part of the Czech Republic). His father was a wool
merchant with a keen mind and a good
sense of humor. His mother was a lively woman, her husband's second
wife
and 20 years younger. She was 21 years old when she gave birth to her
first
son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two older half-brothers and six
younger siblings. When he was four or five - he wasn't sure - the
family
moved to Vienna, where he lived most of his life.

A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he went to
medical
school, one of the few viable options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna
those days. There, he became involved in research under the direction
of
a physiology professor named Ernst Brücke. Brücke believed in
what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now call
reductionism:
"No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active
within
the organism." Freud would spend many years trying to "reduce"
personality
to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on
neurophysiology,
even inventing a special cell-staining technique. But only a limited
number
of positions were available, and there were others ahead of him.
Brücke
helped him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist
Charcot
in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen
were
investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director
of a children's ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna, married his
fiancée
of many years Martha Bernays, and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry,
with the help of his friend Joseph Breuer. It was with Breuer
that
Freud published the first of many books, on the psychological problem
known
then as hysteria, and today as conversion disorder.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from
the mainstream of the medical community. He drew around him a number of
very bright sympathizers who became the core of the psychoanalytic
movement.
Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not
totally
agree with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms; others did
not,
and went on to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna
became
an increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as
Freud.
Not long afterward, in 1939, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw
that he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.

Basic theory

Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus
unconscious
mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. The conscious
mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your
present
perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you.
Working
closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious,
what we might today call "available memory:" anything that can easily
be
made conscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about
but
can readily bring to mind. Now no-one has a problem with these two
layers
of mind. But Freud suggested that these are the smallest parts!

The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all
the
things that are not easily available to awareness, including many
things
that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and
things
that are put there because we can't bear to look at them, such as
unacceptable impulses and the
memories
and emotions associated with trauma.

According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our
motivations,
whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions,
or
the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to
deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often
available to us only in disguised form. We will come back to this.

Freudian psychological reality begins with the organism. The
organism acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those
ends by its needs - hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex.

A part - a very important part - of the organism is the nervous
system,
which has as one its characteristics a sensitivity to the organism's
needs.
At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other
animal,
an "it" or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the
organism's
needs into motivational forces called, in German, Triebe, which
has been translated as instincts or drives. Freud also
called
them wishes. This translation from need to wish is called the primary
process.

The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which
can
be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. Just
picture
the hungry infant, screaming itself purple. It doesn't "know" what it
wants
in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now.
The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the
id
is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology.

Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a
juicy
steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn't enough to satisfy
the
organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming.
You may have noticed that, when you haven't satisfied some need, such
as
the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of your attention,
until there comes a point where you can't think of anything else. This
is the wish or drive breaking into consciousness.

Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we
mentioned before, the conscious, that is hooked up to the world through
the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first
year
of a child's life, some of the "it" becomes "I," some of the id becomes
ego.
The ego relates the organism to reality by means of its consciousness,
and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id creates to
represent
the organism's needs. This problem-solving activity is called the secondary
process.

The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality
principle,
which says "take care of a need as
soon as an appropriate object is
found."
It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason.

However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the
organism)
happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with
objects that actually help it reach its goals. And it keeps a
record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of
the
rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential
objects
in the world of the child - mom and dad. This record of things to
avoid
and strategies to take becomes the superego. It is not
complete
until about six or seven years of age. In some people - psychpaths - it
is never complete.

There are two aspects to the superego: One is the conscience,
which is an internalization of punishments and warnings. The other is
called
the ego ideal. It derives from rewards and positive models
presented
to the child. The conscience and ego ideal communicate their
requirements
to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt.

It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and
accompanying
wishes, this time of a social rather than a biological origin.
Unfortunately,
these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the id. You
see,
the superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better
than to have you never satisfy your needs at all!

Freud saw all human behavior as motivated by the drives or
instincts,
which in turn are the neurological representations of physical needs.
At
first, he referred to them as the life instincts. These
instincts
perpetuate (a) the life of the individual, by motivating him or her to
seek food and water and avoid pain, and (b) the life of the species, by
motivating him
or her to have sex. The motivational energy of these life instincts,
the
"oomph" that powers our psyches, he called libido, from the
Latin
word for "I desire."

Freud's clinical experience led him to view sex as much more
important
in the dynamics of the psyche than other needs. We are, after all,
social
creatures, and sex is the most social of needs. Plus, we have to
remember
that Freud included much more than intercourse in the term sex! Any
desire to touch or be touched was included. Anyway,
libido has come to mean, not any old drive, but the sex drive.

The defense mechanisms

Freud once said "life is not easy!"

The ego - the "I" - sits at the center of some pretty powerful
forces:
society, as represented by the superego; biology, as
represented
by the id; and reality. When these make conflicting demands upon the
poor ego, it is
understandable if the ego
feels threatened, feels overwhelmed,
feels
as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This
feeling
is called anxiety, and it serves as a signal to the ego that
its
survival, and with it the survival of the whole organism, is in
jeopardy.

The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego
as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego
must
defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or
distorting
them into a more acceptable, less threatening form. The techniques the
ego uses are
called the ego defense mechanisms, and Freud - with his
daughter
Anna - discovered quite a few.

Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If
some
situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to
experience
it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense -
no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long! It can
operate
by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle
mechanisms
that support it.

I was once reading while my five year old daughter was watching a
cartoon
(The Smurfs, I think). She was, as was her habit, quite close to the
television,
when a commercial came on. Apparently, no-one at the television station
was paying much attention, because this was a commercial for a horror
movie,
complete with bloody knife, hockey mask, and screams of terror. I
wasn't
able to save my child from this horror, so I did what any good
psychologist
father would do: I talked about it. I said to her "Boy, that was a
scary
commercial, wasn't it?" She said "Huh?" I said "That commercial...it
sure
was scary wasn't it?" She said "What commercial?" I said "The
commercial
that was just on, with the blood and the mask and the screaming...!"
She
had apparently shut out the whole thing.

Since then, I've noticed little kids sort of glazing over when
confronted
by things they'd rather not be confronted by. I've also seen people
faint
at autopsies, people deny the reality of the death of a loved one, and
students fail to pick up their test results. That's denial.

Repression, which Anna Freud also called "motivated
forgetting,"
is just that: not being able to recall a threatening situation, person,
or event. This, too, is dangerous, and is a part of most other
defenses.

As an adolescent, I developed a rather strong fear of spiders,
especially
long-legged ones. I didn't know where it came from, but it was starting
to get rather embarrassing by the time I entered college. At college, a
counselor helped me to get over it (with a technique called systematic
desensitization), but I still had no idea where it came from. Years
later,
I had a dream, a particularly clear one, that involved getting locked
up
by my cousin in a shed behind my grandparents' house when I was very
young.
The shed was small, dark, and had a dirt floor covered with -- you
guessed
it! -- long-legged spiders.

The Freudian understanding of this phobia is pretty simple: I
repressed
a traumatic event - the shed incident - but seeing spiders aroused
the
anxiety of the event without arousing the memory of it.

Other examples abound. Anna Freud provides one that now strikes us
as
quaint: A young girl, guilty about her rather strong sexual desires,
tends
to forget her boy-friend's name, even when trying to introduce him to
her
relations! Or an alcoholic can't remember his suicide attempt, claiming
he must have "blacked out." Or a someone almost drowns as a child, but
can't remember the event even when people try to remind him - but he
does
have this fear of open water!

Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a
substitute
target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you, but the person
you
direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to
someone
or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute.

Someone who hates his or her mother may repress that hatred, but
direct
it instead towards, say, women in general. Someone who has not had the
chance to love someone may substitute cats or dogs for human beings.
Someone
who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may
substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors
may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in
cross-burnings.

Projection, which Anna Freud also called displacement
outward,
involves
the tendency to see your own unacceptable desires in other people. In
other
words, the desires are still there, but they're not your desires
anymore.
I confess that whenever I hear someone going on and on about how
aggressive
everybody is, or how perverted they all are, I tend to wonder if this
person
doesn't have an aggressive or sexual streak in themselves that they'd
rather
not acknowledge.

Let me give you a couple of examples: A husband, a good and faithful
one, finds himself terribly attracted to the charming and flirtatious
lady
next door. But rather than acknowledge his own, hardly abnormal, lusts,
he becomes increasingly jealous of his wife, constantly worried about
her
faithfulness, and so on. Or a woman finds herself having vaguely sexual
feelings about her girlfriends. Instead of acknowledging those feelings
as quite normal, she becomes increasingly concerned with the presence
of
lesbians in her community.

Reaction formation, which Anna Freud called "believing the
opposite,"
is changing an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. So a child,
angry
at his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather
dramatically
shower her with affection. An abused child may run to the abusing
parent.
Or someone who can't accept a homosexual impulse may claim to despise
homosexuals.

Perhaps the most common and clearest example of reaction formation
is
found in children between seven and eleven years old or so: Most boys
will tell
you
in no uncertain terms how disgusting girls are, and girls will tell you
with equal vigor how gross boys are. Adults watching their
interactions,
however, can tell quite easily what their true feelings are!

Introjection, sometimes called identification, involves
taking
into your own personality the characteristics of someone else, because
doing
so solves some emotional difficulty. For example, a child who is left
alone
frequently, may in some way try to become "mom" in order to lessen his
or her fears. You can sometimes catch them telling their dolls or
animals
not to be afraid. And we find the older child or teenager imitating his
or her favorite star, musician, or sports hero in an effort to
establish
an identity.

A more unusual example is a woman who lived next to my grandparents.
Her husband had died and she began to dress in his clothes, albeit
neatly
tailored to her figure. She began to take up various of his habits,
such
as smoking a pipe. Although the neighbors found it strange and referred
to her as "the man-woman," she was not suffering from any confusion
about
her sexual identity. In fact, she later remarried, retaining to the end
her suits and pipe!

I must add here that identification is very important to Freudian
theory
as the mechanism by which we develop our superegos.

Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one
is faced with stress. When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors
often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck his
thumb again or wet the bed when he needs to spend some time in the
hospital.
Teenagers may giggle uncontrollably when introduced into a social
situation
involving the opposite sex. A freshman college student may need to
bring
an old toy from home. A gathering of civilized people may become a
violent
mob when they are led to believe their livelihoods are at stake. Or an
older man, after spending twenty years at a company and now finding
himself
laid off, may retire to his recliner and become childishly dependent on
his wife.

Where do we retreat to when faced with stress? To the last time in
life
when we felt safe and secure, according to Freudian theory.

Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to
make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it often enough on
a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses. But
for
many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that
they
never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are quite
prepared
to believe our lies.

A useful way of understanding the defenses is to see them as a
combination
of denial or repression with various kinds of rationalizations.

All defenses are, of course, lies, even if we are not conscious of
making
them. But that doesn't make them less dangerous - in fact it makes
them
more so. As your grandma may have told you, "Oh what a tangled web we
weave..."
Lies breed lies, and take us further and further from the truth, from
reality.
After a while, the ego can no longer take care of the id's demands, or
pay attention to the superego's. The anxieties come rushing back, and
you
break down.

And yet Freud saw defenses as necessary. You can hardly expect a
person,
especially a child, to take the pain and sorrow of life full on! While
some of his followers suggested that all of the defenses could be used
positively, Freud himself suggested that there was one positive
defense,
which he called sublimation.

Sublimation is the transforming of an unacceptable impulse,
whether
it be sex, anger, fear, or whatever, into a socially acceptable, even
productive
form. So someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a
butcher, a football player, or a mercenary. Someone suffering from a
great
deal of anxiety in a confusing world may become an organizer, a
businessperson,
or a scientist. Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an
artist,
a photographer, or a novelist, and so on. For Freud, in fact, all
positive,
creative activities were sublimations, and predominantly of the sex
drive.

The stages

As I said earlier, for Freud, the sex drive is the most important
motivating
force. In fact, Freud felt it was the primary motivating force not only
for adults but for children and even infants. When he introduced his
ideas
about infantile sexuality to the Viennese public of his day, they were
hardly prepared to talk about sexuality in adults, much less in
infants!

It is true that the capacity for orgasm is there neurologically from
birth. But Freud was not just talking about orgasm. Sexuality meant not
only intercourse, but all pleasurable sensation from the skin. It is
clear
even to the most prudish among us that babies, children, and, of
course,
adults, enjoy tactile experiences such as caresses, kisses, and so on.

Freud noted that, at different times in our lives, different parts
of
our skin give us greatest pleasure. Later theorists would call these
areas
erogenous
zones. It appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest
pleasure
in sucking, especially at the breast. In fact, babies have a penchant
for
bringing nearly everything in their environment into contact with their
mouths. A bit later in life, the child focuses on the anal pleasures of
holding it in and letting go. By three or four, the child may have
discovered
the pleasure of touching or rubbing against his or her genitalia. Only
later, in our sexual maturity, do we find our greatest pleasure in
sexual
intercourse. In these observations, Freud had the makings of a
psychosexual
stage theory.

The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The
focus
of pleasure is, of course, the mouth. Sucking and biting are favorite
activities.

The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four
years
old. The focus of pleasure is the anus. Holding it in and letting it go
are greatly enjoyed.

The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or
seven
years old. The focus of pleasure is the genitalia. Masturbation is
common.

The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty,
that
is, somewhere around 12 years old. During this stage, Freud believed
that
the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning. I must
note
that, while most children seem to be fairly calm, sexually, during
their
grammar school years, perhaps up to a quarter of them are quite busy
masturbating
and playing "doctor." In Freud's repressive era, these children were
perhaps a little more subtle than their modern counterparts.

The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the
resurgence
of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of
pleasure
in sexual intercourse. Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex,
homosexuality,
and many other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were
immature.

This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we
all go through these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these
ages.

The Oedipal crisis

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where
problems
are more likely to arise. For the oral stage, this is weaning. For the
anal stage, it's potty training. For the phallic stage, it is the
Oedipal
crisis, named after the ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who
inadvertently
killed his father and married his mother. This is, with out a
doubt,
the weakest part of his theory. In particular, he introduced two
concepts that practically no one finds realistic: Castration
anxiety
and penis envy.

Castration anxiety is the supposed fear that little boys have of
someone
cutting off their penis. Penis envy is the supposed desire all
little
girls have to grow a penis of their own. If Freud meant these
things
metaphorically, to represent the power of maleness in male-dominated
societies
like his own, we could understand them. But he was serious about
these ideas, and they form the basis of his theory of sexual
development.

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works: The first love-object for all
of
us is our mother. We want her attention, we want her affection, we want
her caresses, we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy,
however,
has a rival for his mother's charms: his father! His father is bigger,
stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with mother, while junior pines
away in his lonely little bed. The boy, recognizing his father's
superiority,
and fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He
displaces
his sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he
identifies with dad, and attempts to become more and
more
like him, that is to say, a man.

The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have
the
problem of getting her to switch her affections to her father before
the
Oedipal process can take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea
of
penis envy: The young girl has noticed the difference between boys and
girls and feels that she, somehow, doesn't measure up. She would like
to
have one, too, and all the power associated with it. At very least, she
would like a penis substitute, such as a baby. As every child knows,
you
need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl
sets
her sights on dad. Dad, of course, is already taken. The young
girl
displaces from him to boys and men, and identifies with mom, the woman
who got the man she really wanted.

As I said, if this part of Freud's theory bothers you a bit, don't
feel
alone: Practically everyone agrees with you!

Character

Your experiences as you grow up contribute to your personality, or
character,
as an adult. Freud felt that traumatic experiences had an especially
strong
effect. Of course, each specific trauma would have its own unique
impact
on a person, which can only be explored and understood on an individual
basis. But traumas associated with stage development, since we all have
to go through them, should have more consistency.

If you have difficulties in any of the tasks associated with the
stages - weaning, potty training, or finding your sexual identity - you
will
tend to retain certain infantile or childish habits. This is called fixation.
Fixation gives each problem at each stage a long-term effect in terms
of
our personality or character.

If you, in the first eight months of your life, are often frustrated
in your need to suckle, perhaps because mother is uncomfortable or even
rough with you, or tries to wean you too early, then you may develop an
oral-passive
character. An oral-passive personality tends to be rather dependent
on others. They often retain an interest in "oral gratifications" such
as eating, drinking, and smoking. It is as if they were seeking the
pleasures
they missed in infancy.

When we are between five and eight months old, we begin teething.
One
satisfying thing to do when you are teething is to bite on something,
like
mommy's nipple. If this causes a great deal of upset and precipitates
an
early weaning, you may develop an oral-aggressive personality.
These
people retain a life-long desire to bite on things, such as pencils,
gum,
and other people. They have a tendency to be verbally aggressive,
argumentative,
sarcastic, and so on.

In the anal stage, we are fascinated with our "bodily functions." At
first, we can go whenever and wherever we like. Then, out of the blue
and
for no reason you can understand, the powers that be want you to do it
only at certain times and in certain places. And parents seem to
actually
value the end product of all this effort!

Some parents put themselves at the child's mercy in the process of
toilet
training. They beg, they cajole, they show great joy when you do it
right,
they act as though their hearts were broken when you don't. The child
is
the king of the house, and knows it. This child will grow up to be an anal
expulsive (a.k.a. anal aggressive) personality. These
people
tend to be sloppy and disorganized, but generous to a fault. They may
be
cruel,
destructive, and given to vandalism and graffiti.

Other parents are strict. They may be competing with their neighbors
and relatives as to who can potty train their child first. (Early potty
training with intelligence back in the day. Needless to say,I was potty
trained by 9 months!)
They may use punishment or humiliation. This child will likely become
constipated
as he or she tries desperately to hold it in at all times, and will
grow
up to be an anal retentive personality. He or she will tend to
be
especially clean, perfectionistic, dictatorial, very stubborn, and
stingy.
In other words, the anal retentive is "tight" in all ways.

There are also two phallic personalities, although no-one
has
given them names. If the boy is harshly rejected by his mother, and
rather
threatened by his very masculine father, he is likely to have a poor
sense
of self-worth when it comes to his sexuality. He may deal with this by
either withdrawing from heterosexual interaction, perhaps becoming a
book-worm,
or by putting on a rather macho act and playing the ladies' man. A girl
rejected by her father and threatened by her very feminine mother is
also
likely to feel poorly about herself, and may become a wall-flower or a
hyper-feminine "belle."

But if a boy is not rejected by his mother, but rather favored over
his weak, milquetoast father, he may develop quite an opinion of
himself
(which may suffer greatly when he gets into the real world, where
nobody
loves him like his mother did), and may appear rather effeminate. After
all, he has no cause to identify with his father. Likewise, if a girl
is
daddy's little princess and best buddy, and mommy has been relegated to
a
sort of servant role, then she may become quite vain and self-centered,
or possibly rather masculine.

These various phallic characters demonstrate an important point in
Freudian
characterology: Extremes lead to extremes. If you are frustrated in
some
way or overindulged in some way, you have problems. And, although each
problem tends to lead to certain characteristics, these characteristics
can also easily be reversed. So an anal retentive person may suddenly
become
exceedingly generous, or may have some part of his life where he is
terribly messy. This is frustrating to scientists, but it may reflect
the
reality of personality!

Many of Freud's ideas have become a part of common culture - who
hasn't
heard of denial and repression, for example. And the foundations
he built for therapy are still very much alive. But, outside of
terminology,
not many psychologists today call themselves Freudians. His work
is now of mostly historical interest. While many of his concepts
appeared to apply well to the upper-class of turn of the century
Europe,
it hasn't generalized well to other cultures or to modern times.
But beware of those who take delight in knocking Freud down: He
was
a brilliant student of human nature, and there aren't many
psychologists
who haven't had to admit that, as often as not, Freud had it right!